Return to Bermudas Index
Return to Part II
by labingi
Sikozu doubted they would leave this planet alive. By the time they were ready to eject, they had scanned three Scarran ships in pursuit, two following the planet-hopper and one Scorpius' pod. The ship following them was barely within visual range. Far too close.
They ran Scorpius' pod low over the ground just west of his mother's and ejected, falling in a heap in the grass, cushioned by their ejector seats' crash fields. No time to run. They hid in the tall oats as best they could and waited for the Scarran ship to pass--or come for them.
Perhaps sixty microts later, it shrieked over them without slowing. They lay still in the dark for another quarter arn, long enough for the night to chill Sikozu. Then, half-staggering, they moved east toward the old pod.
The main hatch was unfastened.
"Touch nothing but the floor--and that with care," said Scorpius.
As he clicked the hatch into place behind them, the moonlit night went black. For a microt, there was nothing but the rush of their breathing. Then a brief rustling, and a small emergency lamp flared on. Scorpius placed it on the floor. In its cold light, furnishings leapt out of the shadows: two consoles, a bed, storage units, four seats. Sikozu shivered. Though the temperature was above freezing, her use of her radiation had drained her, made her sensitive to environmental stressors. Feeling all at once that her legs would collapse, she sat on the floor, staring awkwardly up at the consoles.
Scorpius was running a hand scanner around the pod with slow deliberation. The extent of his precautions suggested an excessive fear of this place. Sikozu wondered how acute his prior capture here stood out in his mind.
He looked terrible. The skin of his face was oozing in places where her radiation had degraded the tissue. She could only hope the damage had been merely superficial.
"Are you all right?" she asked him.
"For the moment," he replied without breaking off from his scanning.
Sikozu strove to recall the details Scorpius had told her of his mother's capture. Rylani and her husband had not been here more than two solar days. If the pod had been properly maintained, it should still have edible food concentrates and an emergency water supply in case recycling became unavailable. She studied the pod more closely. A thick layer of dust covered everything, and clumps that looked and smelled like mold had gathered on the non-metallic surfaces, most notably the bed. Beside the bed lay a discarded heap that might once have been a blanket, fit now only for constituent recycling.
Scorpius stepped close past her, still scanning--he made a surreptitious scan of her as well, she noted. His face was shining with sweat.
"We should change your cooling rods," she observed.
"Presently," he answered.
She was on the point of grabbing his emergency pack and locating the replacement rods, when it occurred to her that he would not trust her to rifle through his supplies. So she sat still and waited.
After a time he said, "I can locate no sign of a trap." He paused. "Which does not mean there is none. I suggest that we tamper with this pod's systems as little as we reasonably can."
"Very well," said Sikozu. "Now let me change your rods."
Scorpius sat heavily on the floor and let her do so. His used rods were so hot to the touch that it almost hurt to hold them. But she herself was so cold that the heat was more than welcome. After she had replaced his rods, she placed the hot ones in strategic spots inside her clothes; Scorpius watched her with slight smile.
A little warmer, Sikozu found that she was enormously tired. She eyed the teeming ecosystem that the bed had become. There were worse things, of course, than sleeping in mold. Still. . .
"I wonder if there is spare bedding stored here." With difficulty, she got to her feet and made for the storage compartments. Gingerly, she opened one, then another. There were food and water--and blankets too, only slightly mildewed.
Fighting exhaustion by sheer will, she stripped the old bedding and arranged the new. Scorpius studied her, no doubt finding her fastidiousness a waste of energy. Then, to her surprise, he got up and helped her, tossing the old bedding into the recycler. As soon as the blankets were in place, she pulled off her boots and collapsed on the mattress, sticking herself with one of the still warm cooling rods. She repositioned it and settled down to sleep. He lowered the lamp to a faint glow and lay down beside her. She kept her back to him; it seemed easier that way. Though they were not touching, his heat radiated against her. Soon she was warm and comfortable.
He must have awakened her when he rose. One moment, there was sleep and the next she lay half-dozing, dimly aware that the lamp was brighter. Finally, she roused herself enough to look around. He was sitting in one of the flight chairs. Her first impression was that there was something horribly wrong with his head. Then, she saw he had merely taken off his hood. After a microt, it came to her that he was cleaning up his damaged skin with an antiseptic wash. She lay back down.
In their time together, she had seen him naked on several occasions but seen his naked face only once--the first time they had recreated. His reticence was not surprising: he looked like a different man without the mask and hood. His head seemed larger, less Sebacean. She remembered staring at the pale scars the straps had etched on his face with decades of rubbing. He did not like to be looked at that way; she would not look at him now.
Presently, he donned the hood again and crossed to the storage compartments.
"Is your face worse?" she asked.
"Better," he replied, pulling out field rations.
"Have you suffered other ill-effects from the radiation?"
"It appears to have been limited to my exposed skin."
A surge of relief shook the last remnants of sleep from Sikozu. She sat up, disarranging the cooling rods still wedged into her clothing. The rods were now a lukewarm purplish-pink. She returned them to Scorpius' emergency pack to cool, aware of his eyes scrutinizing her movements.
She watched him eat his rations; she herself would not need to eat for another weeken. Then they took stock of the pod. There was no obvious sign of damage. The water should last about ten days, the food longer. The toilet was designed to operate mechanically if power was lost.
While she assessed their supplies, he activated a low power receiver, which should pull in enough coms traffic to give a sense of Scarran activity. The toxicity in the Chrystherium fields was reported as pervasive. They grinned at each other at that. The only other relevant com was a clipped announcement: both ships destroyed, search for survivors continuing.
"Once search efforts are scaled back," Scorpius said, "we should lift off, leave orbit, and then power down non-essential systems."
"And send a distress signal?" Sikozu added. At some point, they must either call for rescue or procure another ship; they could not escape by themselves in a pod with no faster than light capability.
"It seems the best course," he answered. "If we are fortunate, the distress frequency your colleagues provided will not register on Scarran sensors."
"It will not," declared Sikozu. "We know better than that." She looked with trepidation at the dust covering the controls. "If we plan to lift this thing off, we must run systems checks."
"No," said Scorpius. "Not yet. We will wait until the search for us is no longer top priority before powering up the computer."
That made sense. If the Scarrans read a power signature from this pod, they would certainly investigate.
"Then, there is nothing else to do," she said.
"Not for moment," he replied and returned to the bed, where he thumped on his back and lay motionless.
Sikozu wandered around the pod, reflecting that her intellect had not been constructed to accommodate long periods of pointless idleness.
"We could improvise a chess set," she suggested.
After a microt, he replied, "If you wish," by which she suspected he meant, "Learn how to amuse yourself, you infant."
She rummaged through the storage compartments once more. Under some bedding, she discovered a small carrier bag. Opening it with all due caution, she found inside a globe representing a planet she could not immediately identify; a data chip marked "Motak 4: Water Survey," a crude statuette inscribed "Audiovisual Abstracts: Third Place," dated some sixty cycles ago, and an assortment of 2D pictures of Sebaceans. Sikozu could recognize Rylani and her husband from the files Scorpius had let her see. They looked young and happy and entirely unremarkable. She did not know the other people.
Scorpius would want to see this.
"Scorpius," she called, "are you familiar with these?"
He came to sit beside her and glanced through the pictures quickly. "I have previously located some of these images in public data stores," he remarked. "Others are new to me." It puzzled Sikozu that he seemed uninterested in them. If she had a real family, she would want to know all she could about it. Even the scientists who'd created her had always held a personal fascination. Even Scorpius' family intrigued her.
"Do you know these other people?" she asked. "Besides Rylani and Ghebb?"
With seeming reluctance, he scanned through the pictures again. "This is my mother's sister." He pointed to a young woman smiling, with an arm around Rylani. "She is now matriarch of the surviving family on New Heather." He ran through a few more pictures. "These are her parents": a slightly older-looking man and woman. "I am unacquainted with the others." He set the pictures down and took up the statuette. "The New Heather public database has a record my mother's winning this award for a fractal-based sound painting."
"Unusual for a farmer," Sikozu observed.
After some microts, he said, "In an interview for the local news reports, she was asked if she planned to pursue a career as an artist. She said she considered art a hobby and wished to remain a farmer."
It was not difficult to see the rest of the thought: if she had given up being a farmer, she would probably be alive today.
Sikozu picked up the globe to distract him. "New Heather?" she surmised.
He sighed as he got up. "They would have done well to stay there." He returned to the bed and was still.
Sikozu had expected a greater show of interest. Yet perhaps he was not uninterested so much as loath to show his interest to her. He did not trust her anymore. And when one did not trust, one minimized the vulnerabilities one shared.
She found herself thinking of Madahe, the scientist who had been her genetic template. She remembered watching Madahe's face and pondering how her own face would wrinkle like the older woman's someday. Madahe had been killed before Sikozu had come to Moya. Aside from the decimation of the Resistance and the loss of Scorpius' good will, that death was the most painful wound Sikozu had suffered.
It must be something like that, the way Scorpius thought of Rylani. He cared for her even though she had been dead his whole life.
A new thought occurred.
He had come to help Sikozu at the coordination station, even though he could have left her, aborted the mission and seeded the toxin at a later time. Did that indicate he still cared for her too?
***
There were too many things in this pod that Scorpius would rather not observe: on the floor, a pink smear, almost certainly Ghebb's blood cleaned up hastily by the Peacekeepers who had discovered his body; a pulse pistol blast mark on the wall, a shot gone wide, Ghebb's too probably. Scorpius had thrown the old blanket away, the one that had lain on that spot on the floor ever since his mother had knocked it there, startled out of her sleep by the Scarrans.
The personal effects Sikozu had uncovered intensified his agitation. He had once found a recording of his mother's third place sound painting: a swirling array of colors and harmonics constructed according to a fractal pattern. The skill with which she had executed it had reinforced his belief that his own predisposition for mathematics came from her. He had wondered sometimes how things might have been different if her family had sent her to a science academy, or if the Peacekeepers had conscripted her. She might have had a career as a scientist. She might never have had to endure--
That, of course, was the most futile type of conjecture: the longing to alter the past. Part of him whispered that wormholes could do it, that John had done it, temporarily altering the Earth of his own past. But the possibility lacked practical application. The variables were too difficult to account for.
And still, he wasted his time imagining a better life for her.
He regretted having told Sikozu so much of his origins. His mother's name on her lips reminded him of how much she knew, of how advantageous a position she was in to make psychological assessments of him, to plan manipulations to which he might, in fact, succumb.
He had told Natira of his origins too. Raw with youth, he had gone to her after killing Tauza because he'd needed to speak of all he'd learned about his mother. But when he had tried, the words had strangled. He had kissed her instead. That had been the first time he had recreated with her. When they had finished, he had locked himself in the washroom so that she would not see him cry. He had not cried since that day.
He was not a youth anymore. Once, long ago, he had trusted Natira. But cycles of experience had taught him better. By the time she had attempted to kill him, he had scarcely been surprised. He had felt ill-used but not betrayed.
Betrayal required confidence. And how could he, as careful as he'd known himself to be, have placed so much confidence in Sikozu with so little justification?
After he had told Natira of his mother--and regretted it, he had assured himself that he would not repeat the error. Yet within a cycle of having met Sikozu, he had done so. It almost defied belief that she had made him such a fool.
He realized with a start that for a half-arn, at least, he had not been attending to the coms traffic babbling through the receiver. He got up and loaded the last arn's signals to the receiver's small vid screen as text. Scrolling through, he found that the search for them continued, but priority had now been given to combating the poison in the fields. They would not find it easy to counteract. He wanted to feel triumphant at the Scarrans' consternation, but, in the main, he felt merely weary.
"They've deprioritized us," Sikozu remarked from the floor where she was still looking through his mother's pictures. For a moment, Scorpius despised her for hammering in her own presence of mind in staying abreast of coms. She looked up at him. "Perhaps we should begin work on the pod?"
Perhaps they should at that. Begin to put an end to being stranded here together. "We should attempt to power up the interior systems only," he replied. "If I place my infrared reflector on full outside the ship, our energy signature should be unobtrusive."
All things considered, the pod was in better condition than Scorpius had anticipated. Interior power came on without a glitch. Their systems checks, however, kept reporting different results, indicating that diagnostic program itself was faulty and needed recoding. That was three arns work. Once corrected, the D. P. reported numerous malfunctions but none that should prove irreparable.
By the time night had fallen outside, they were both losing efficiency. Though several arns of work remained, Scorpius convinced Sikozu to power down for the night. He ate his rations by the light of his emergency lamp, while they listened to snatches of military code. Ideally, they would have slept in shifts so that one of them could monitor coms traffic. But as they both needed rest, Scorpius rigged an alarm to the receiver and set it to sound at certain key words. Then, as last night, he dimmed the lamp, and they went to bed.
They lay side by side for a time, neither speaking nor sleeping, the receiver chattering across the room. At length, Sikozu got up on her elbow and peered at him aggravatingly.
"You have your grandmother's eyes," she observed, though she could not possibly see it in the low light.
He glared at her with them.
Unperturbed, she continued, "Your mother had her father's eyes, but you inherited her recessive gene from her mother." She paused, then added, "I find it curious that a recessive Sebacean gene should be dominant over a Scarran gene. In terms of basic population genetics, that seems a challenge to Scarran superiority."
Having no inclination to discuss his genes with Sikozu--and still less to contemplate "populations" of Scarran-Sebacean hybrids--he replied, "I am not a population."
"No," she agreed and continued to study him.
After some microts, he suggested, "We should sleep," hoping to get her to turn away.
She looked at him a microt longer and said, "You do not wish to recreate with me anymore, do you?"
Absurdly, the question took him by surprise. He had assumed they could no longer interact sexually, but it struck him now he had been mistaken. Recreation was an activity that required neither honesty nor loyalty. There was nothing in Sikozu's betrayal that prevented them from engaging in sex.
In the silence that stretched out between them, Sikozu bent and kissed him softly. Her touch was so intimately familiar that it was difficult to believe it had been two cycles since they'd kissed. Her lips were the same, her scent the same. Her hair brushed his face just as it had before she'd cut it. And the way he found himself raising his hand to her face and brushing back her hair was the same as well.
And would it also be the same, the way she won his confidence without his even realizing how totally he had given it?
It would not, he determined. Now he was on his guard.
As she kissed him deeper, it seemed remarkable that throughout this mission, he had not desired her, for all at once the desire flared within him. He drew her closer.
She was taking off his gloves as she used to. And though he was glad to have his hands bare to touch her, he did not like the fact that she took the liberty. When his hands were free, he retaliated by wrestling her out of her tech's shirt. She grinned and, disposing quickly of the rest of her clothes, stretched out again on top of him.
He tried to ascertain what she was thinking, but her expression was opaque.
And that was the difference, he realized. She had the same skin, the same limbs, the same taste. But now he knew that he did not know who she was underneath all of that.
Delicately, he was licking her neck. It occurred to him that he was touching her as he had when they'd first recreated: unwilling to risk alienating her, he had held her with a scrupulous gentleness. Later, when he had been more certain of her attachment, he had handled her more freely. He had experimented with her to discover how much pain her body could unite to pleasure. They had played at matching pleasure with pain.
But they were not playing now. Just under the surface, his rage at her still simmered. If he hurt her now, it was likely he would hurt her less to pleasure than to punish. And that was unacceptable--most especially here, in his mother's bed, in this bed where perhaps she had recreated for the last time willingly with her husband.
He turned Sikozu onto her back and mounted her, her skin soft against his hands and face. She wound her arms around his back tightly so that he could feel the pressure through his suit. Under ideal circumstances, the ambient temperature would be cool enough for him to recreate naked. But if they were discovered here, he did not want to be without his clothes on—and he was still weakened by Sikozu's radiation. She had stopped at removing his gloves, just as she'd always stopped before. He knew that she preferred him to take his suit off to recreate, but she had never asked for more than he was willing to give. He undid his suit enough to free his erection and felt her wrap her legs around him. When he entered her, she sighed and whispered softly, "I have missed you."
It was easy to get lost in her. It merely took a little caution to keep his Scarran half in check, to hold her carefully as if she had been hurt enough already. That was not difficult here in this bed, where it almost seemed it his mother was watching him. What would she think if she saw them here? *Two aliens recreating*? What would she think if she knew he was her son? . . . What would she think?
The thought died unanswered somewhere in the softness of Sikozu.
***
Sikozu lay quiescent with her head against his shoulder. For the first time since they had parted, she was completely happy--not with everything in the universe, of course, but happy with where she was right now. His touch had been like old times, and different too, gentler. No, that wasn't right, because on the Command Carrier, they had had their gentle moments. It was not something that had been added but something that was missing--the easy roughness.
Her mood sank a little. He'd been very reserved, as if disinclined to act his desires out openly with her.
Into her mind, unwelcome, came his words on that day: that he'd only ever used her to service his desires. She had not believed it. Yet the words kept nagging at her, and, in part, she could not help but believe.
He had been honest with her before. Honest and inclusive, just as she had asked. In everything? Well, with sex at least. But had that been the honesty of one who didn't care what she thought, what she felt? No, it had never been off-hand like that. But this time, when he'd held her, there had been an intimacy they had seldom reached before.
Or was it a distance?
Her contentment was giving way to a confusion that defied analysis.
Not knowing what else to do, she wrapped an arm around him and drew closer. He let her do so, even embraced her in return. That, in itself, restored her peace a little. She could hear his metabolically accelerated heart thundering under her head, as a child in the womb might hear it. For all these two cycles, she had longed to put her arms around him, as if grasping his body could bring his faith in her back. She knew better than that obviously. But the fantasy held some comfort nonetheless.
She needed to hear him speak, needed to know where his mind was. She pondered various things she might say and how he might respond. It all seemed empty words. Of course, what she wanted to tell him was--
--was what she should tell him, she realized. If she wished for honesty, she must give it. Even if it made her seem a sentimental fool. Even if that was what she was.
"Scorpius," she said carefully, "I wish to be with you again."
After a moment, he remarked, "I am not averse to recreating with you in the future."
She raised herself up to look at his face. "I mean, I wish to live with you again, to work with you."
He was gazing at her narrowly. "Surely, you have prior responsibilities to the Resistance." Though his tone had not changed, there was a sting in the words.
She bit back a retort. "I could serve as your liaison to the Resistance."
"I already have the three contacts you provided."
"But I am more accustomed to working on the outskirts of Scarran space, where you coordinate your network."
"I find the contacts you provided sufficient."
Her anger blazed up. "None of those contacts--" She stopped and continued more calmly, "None of those contacts is prepared to offer you the personal loyalty I have to you."
He smiled. "Loyalty?"
She shook her head. "You still believe I am planning to betray you."
He drew back from her a little to meet her gaze better. In a quieter, serious voice, he said, "Sikozu, the difficulty is not that I expect you to betray me. The difficulty is that I lack the means to determine satisfactorily whether or not you have."
Sikozu digested that for some microts and realized with a start that it was a grave admission. He had as much as told her that her powers of deception outmatched his perception. She was proud of his praise, shamed by his distrust, and sorry for him all at once. He was so far from comprehending.
"Scorpius, you must understand that if I was able to conceal my. . . alliance with the Scarrans, it was because the only things I had to conceal were the implant in my shoulder and my agitation. My hatred for the Scarrans, my desire to aid the Peacekeepers, my loyalty to you: that was truth, not concealment."
For a moment, he studied her. Then, to her surprise, he said, "I believe that."
"Then you know that I belong with you."
"On the contrary, you have articulated precisely the reason we should not work together."
This was beyond exasperating. "How?"
He took on his lecturing tone. "It is an axiom that lies are most effective when they stand near to the truth. By your own admission, the more loyal you wish to be to me, the more readily you might deceive me, if you felt the necessity of doing so."
"And what are the odds of my feeling that necessity ever again?" she snapped.
For a time, he did not answer. Then he said only, "Incalculable."
She pulled away from him and, in the chill of the night, searched for her clothes. As she jerked them on, she asserted, "You are a pitiable fool."
It seemed he hesitated. "You have a right to think so."
She settled back under the blankets a little way from him. "*You*," she said, "are discarding something unique. You are discarding an ally who has only two things in this universe left to care about: freeing my people and you."
As she said the words, she felt the weight of her own admission. Madahe was gone. She could not safely speak to the others who had made her. For safety's sake, too, she seldom saw her bioloid colleagues, never got to know them. Some of the people on Moya had begun once to seem a little like friends. But her ties to them had not survived her leaving with Scorpius. When she had returned during the war, they had not even looked at her. They had not even said, "Hello." And all of that left only two things to hold to: the liberation of the Kalish and him.
She knew what he would say: he'd offer a mathematically incontrovertible explanation of why the vital task was to decimate Scarran power, at the expense of the Kalish if necessary.
He did not say it. He did not say anything. In the quiet, she listened to Scarran voices crackling in spurts of military code.
It was a long time before she could sleep.
***
Sikozu's profession of loyalty had all the hyperbole of seduction. It bothered Scorpius that he was inclined, nonetheless, to consider it genuine. And perversely, it also bothered him that he did not believe her completely. Inanely, he wanted to have trust in her and skepticism both.
More troubling was her contention that circumstances should not arise that would persuade her to betray him again. He had told her the probability of such a betrayal was incalculable, which was true--but ridiculous. Realistically, she was correct: the odds of her being compromised as she had been before were minuscule. Such a circumstance would require her to survive capture; it would require the Scarrans to produce another significant threat against her people. That was not so hard to envision. But it was also require their willingness to make use of her a second time, when the first time had ended with her discovery. And if she were working with him and they knew it, they would know he must be on his guard: it all made her an unattractive option for a spy.
Weighing the facts, he could only conclude that his fear of betrayal was unwarranted. At bottom, he believed he had known that already.
But did that mean he should trust her again?
For the true problem was not Sikozu's actions but the failure in judgment she occasioned in him. He trusted her, but he did not trust himself to trust her.
***
Sikozu jerked awake to the whining of the alarm. While Scorpius turned up the light, she scrambled to the receiver to check the coms traffic.
"The search has been called off," she reported to Scorpius. "They're diverting all personnel to clean-up efforts in the fields." She read on. "Agricultural specialists have been called in from off-planet: four freighters should be arriving within a solar day."
"Then, now is our window to leave," he said. He was already powering up the computer.
After five arns of interior repairs, they were ready to check propulsion. Unsurprisingly, the check showed mechanical faults. In the icy gray of dawn, they made a visual exam of the launch system. The aft thrusters were half-buried, and vegetation had invaded several subsystems. While Sikozu pulled roots out of the stabilizer, Scorpius began to dig the thrusters out with a hoe, of all things—an implement only a farmer would store on a life pod.
The sun was sinking toward the horizon by the time they were prepared to launch. The Scarran ships read less than six arns away.
Sikozu held her breath as they ran the launch sequence. The lights read "go"; the pod rumbled.
Then it stuttered to a halt, a warning light registering a malfunction in the stabilizer.
"Again!" cried Sikozu, unstrapping herself from her chair. "I spent three arns on that thing." It would have to be a system *she* had been working on that chose to break down.
Scorpius, she noted ruefully, said nothing, leaving the blinking of the warning light to bear testament against her.
The launch sequence had shaken apart several frayed connections that would need to be replaced. It was *not* her fault, she told herself. But it took more than an arn for the two of them to cannibalize the necessary parts from other systems and make the repairs.
They tried again. Again, the pod rumbled. Four tolerance warning lights came on, but that was not worth powering down for. With agonizing slowness, they arced up into the air. Sikozu's heart was pounding ferociously. If any Scarran spotted them now, they were defenseless.
But no one attacked them.
They swung through a partial orbit, plotted a trajectory away from Scarran space. Then, as they had planned, they cut power, save for life support and basic sensors.
Taut as a vibrating string, Sikozu trembled.
They waited and watched. After four arns, the first Scarran ships arrived. Over the next two arns, one by one, the freighters skimmed razor-close past the pod's position and landed on the planet. When all the ships had landed, Sikozu activated the distress signal gave in to fatigue.
She fell asleep in the light of the sensor readout that Scorpius was still monitoring. When she awoke, groggy and disoriented, he was sleeping beside her. She recalibrated her internal chronometer: two arns had passed. She got up and checked the sensors: nothing.
He was gazing at her when she turned back to the bed.
She lay down once more beside him. "Nothing," she said, referring to the sensors--and, she realized, to much more than that.
He made no reply. She knew he had nothing to say to her. She had told herself that she could fix what she'd broken, as if their lives could be mended like a burnt-out circuit. But there was no way back. She turned away so he would not see her face contort with misery.
*Ironic*, she thought. She longed to be rescued. But as soon as they were off this pod, he would walk away again. Again, she had failed.
Out of the gloom, his voice came quietly: "I have found your conduct on this mission unimpugnable."
For an instant, she felt herself glow to the praise--but a microt later, the glow exploded in a fire of indignation. She bolted upright, whipping around to face him.
"Do not patronize me," she warned. "I am not your child or your student or your lackey. I am not your dupe. I am not your tralk. I am your ally, or I am nothing."
She was nothing.
He eyed her coolly. After some microts, he said, "You are a Kalish agent."
Yes. She was. She looked away, embarrassed that it had taken him to remind her.
She was a Kalish agent, and as such, she knew that there was always something else to try. There was always a way forward.
As if in answer to the thought, a signal began to beep the response code to their distress call.
***
It would be a relief to be rid of Sikozu. In another twenty arns, the planet-hopper that had picked them up would deposit Scorpius at his nearest base and take her back to the Resistance. And then he could clean his mind of her.
Their Kalish pilot had requested they stay in the mess hall, which was shielded from certain scans, while he passed through customs checkpoints.
So Scorpius watched Sikozu eat. As long as he was confined with her, he could at least observe whether her recent use of her radiation had left her more than usually hungry. It had, at any rate, prompted her to eat earlier than she had indicated she'd need to. She had performed well on Motak 4. There was no doubt of that. She had often made a valuable ally. And if she wished to be his ally again. . . ?
But he needed her gone.
No. Of course, he did not *need* it.
But he wanted it, as he wanted to be free of the belongings of his mother's she had smuggled off the life pod. He had determined to return them to the family on New Heather. The package must not, of course, be traceable to him. Perhaps he should contact Br--
Sikozu's voice intruded.
"I have a practical suggestion," she said.
"Regarding what?"
She swallowed a large bite of flibisk and answered, "Us. Enabling you to trust me."
More of this? He waited.
After a microt, she went on, "I do not wish to be implanted with a transmitter. But I would consent to a basic tampering alarm, designed to send you a signal if certain parameters are broken--if, for example, I undergo a surgical procedure, or if an unfamiliar electric signal is noted in my body. Such a device would have alerted you immediately to the coms the Scarrans implanted in me."
An interesting idea. "It would also alert me to circumstances such as your torture."
"Yes, it would," said Sikozu, "which would be a good thing for me. . . if you chose to take action in response to such an alert."
He smiled. They both knew that he was not likely to be in a position to send a rescue force across light years just for her.
Sikozu looked down at her food. "Of course, such a device can be switched off. But it can be keyed to send an alert prior to shutdown if it is not shut off according to the proper code sequence. I would consent to allow you to be the sole holder of that code."
That surprised him. As an indication of her sincerity, it was convincing. The only other person he had known who had willingly submitted to long-term tracking at his sole discretion was Braca. And Braca he trusted. And yet there were still many ways that Sikozu could deceive him without her body being tampered with.
He made no reply.
She chewed her food for a time, then said quietly, "I was thinking that--if you deemed it efficacious--I would be willing to submit, as well, to a remote relay for the device that could incapacitate. . . or perhaps. . . kill me, if you judged that the risk of my being. . . compromised was too great."
That had to be a bluff. Unsure how to respond, he opted for a simple, logical reply: "The odds of a situation arising in which I would be able to make such an assessment from a remote location are quite low."
She threw him a wry smile. "I am wagering that, in assessing, you would err on the side of caution? --caution with my life, I mean."
"You are willing to place that much trust in me?"
She hesitated. "I have trust enough."
Trust enough. He found himself turning over scenarios in which her offer might be used against him. He was about to tell her he would take it under consideration, when he realized there was no need. People could no more be one hundred percent reliable than conventional energetic reactions could be one hundred percent efficient. That being, as ever, the case, what she had offered was the most he could expect, was more than he could have expected.
"I consent to your suggestion," he told her.
She stared at him a moment, as if genuinely startled. Then, she got up and crossed around the table to sit next to him. "Then, my life is in your hands," she said gravely.
"It has been before," he replied. "And you are alive."
She smiled slightly. "Why else do you think I offered?"
He took her by the hand and drew her into his lap. "And you wish to be my liaison?"
She rested her forehead against his. "I believe I have earned it."
"I believe you have."
He kissed her hard.
